Twenty-nine
I’d had the whole weekend to prepare myself to see Mason on Monday. It wasn’t enough.
I told myself I wouldn’t so much as peek, but I wasn’t that strong.
Mason looked nothing like himself. His eyes were sunken over bruise-like circles, his hair fluffy like he’d neglected to properly dry it after a shower.
Even his colors seemed muted, duller, but that might have just been me.
Everything had looked grayer the last few days.
He was okay, though. Unkempt, slouchy, wearing another hoodie to cover his burn, but okay. His chest rose and fell beneath the green fabric. Still breathing.
I hadn’t done that since Saturday, afraid it would hurt somehow. Mason watched me enter. I could practically feel him holding his breath, like he was saving up air for the speech he would give the second I sat down across from him.
Someone cleared their throat behind me in the doorway. I tore my eyes away from him and went up to Mrs. Garroway’s desk.
“Can I switch seats?” I asked her. She squinted her puffy eyes, not unlike a Chihuahua, looking a lot like she was trying to think up a reason to deny me. “To cut out any distractions. I want to focus on my craft,” I added.
This seemed to please her. Her usual pinched scowl became a modest, slightly puckered grimace. She pointed to an untaken seat a few tables down from my old one. I would be facing Mason’s back. It was perfect.
It left me in Cella’s line of sight, though. As I sat, I noticed her studying me, frowning. She averted her eyes.
She wasn’t the only one. The three underclassmen at the table spoke more quietly after I joined them, like I might threaten them with scissors if they bothered me, which gave me a pretty good idea of how I looked.
I spent the class ducked over my paper, my hair falling over my face—it was as lifeless as me today.
It was getting too long. I had put off cutting it after one too many hints from Mason that he liked it shaggy.
The week’s topic was shadow, and by the end of class, my drawing was shaping up to be a man’s silhouette with a beast’s shadow.
Which definitely defeated the purposes of the assignment, but I had yet to get a bad grade in this class, so cheers to artistic license or what the fuck ever.
I sandwiched it between two other works-in-progress on the rack so Mason wouldn’t see. The bell rang while I was up, and I beelined for the door. Despite my head start, Mason caught up to me before I reached the end of the hallway.
“Are you actually running from me right now?”
“That would be dramatic. I’m avoiding you.”
Mason’s hand closed around my wrist. He backed up, leaning against the lockers. “Is that why you blocked my number?”
“I didn’t. My phone’s been off.” Hope flickered in his eyes. “But if you call me, I will.”
He pulled on our joined hands. I hadn’t even noticed his fingers sliding down to mine; it felt natural.
“You look terrible,” he said.
“Charming as ever.”
“That’s not—so do I. I barely slept all weekend, but I barely got out of bed, either. Everything’s all out of sorts. My point is that we both feel like shit, and it’s because this isn’t right.”
“Of course it isn’t.” I shook off his grip. “Is that all you wanted to say?”
“Can you not play cool right now?”
“Can you not play dumb?” I retaliated. “You know I’m not doing this for no reason.”
“Yeah, well, your reason blows.”
Someone to my right murmured, “Uh, excuse me.” I looked down at the girl, presumably the owner of the locker we were blocking, and she squeaked out a, “Never mind,” and walked around us with a wide berth.
Mason, unbelievably, laughed. My gaze snapped to him, and I caught the tail end of it, the tiny smile. “Was the death glare necessary?” he asked.
“I wasn’t—this is just my face!” I whisper-yelled, suddenly aware that we weren’t alone.
The smile shakily grew. Mason’s eyes shone.
“What are you so happy about?” I grumbled.
“I’m a wreck, are you kidding?” he said. “But I can’t help it. I just love the way you are.”
It was a punch in the chest, straight to my swollen heart.
“I have to get to class.”
“Please don’t go,” Mason said, and his eyes said now or ever. “We can work this out. You’re smart as hell, and I’m tougher than you’re giving me credit for. We can come up with a plan, something foolproof. You could at least try.”
“If you want to keep trying to get yourself killed, I want nothing to do with it.”
“Quit talking to me like I’m an idiot.”
“Then quit acting like one!” I snapped, rough with it, every bit as mean as everyone believed me to be. I glared because it was easier than trying to feign neutral. That was how I’d gotten by all these years. Like a snake, I hissed when threatened. I bared my fangs, venom on my tongue.
A shadow crossed his face. Mason said, “I’d rather be an idiot than a coward.”
If he wanted to hurt me, he’d have to tell me something I didn’t already know.
“Call me what you want,” I said, thinking, Kick me, curse me, just be okay.
The bell rang. The hall had emptied; we were late. Shaking his head, Mason slipped out from between me and the locker.
“Wait,” I said. He looked so tired. “Are you . . . Will you be okay? That’s—the mates thing.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “Come on, Mason.”
“I already told you; I don’t want you to worry about that. If that’s what it takes to make you stay, I’d rather you go. I’m not going to guilt you into a relationship.”
It wasn’t enough. I started to demand more, then closed my mouth when I realized I’d given up the right to.
“I’ll see you around, Kieran.”
And he walked away.
***
Once again, I found myself in the library during lunch.
Having gone the weekend without doing a second of homework, I missed two assignments and barely scraped by on my econ test. When I turned my phone back on that evening, I had several texts and two calls from Mason, enough texts from Annalisa to fill the screen, and a message from Cella. I deleted all of them without reading.
Mason did call again, later that night. I kept my word and blocked him. After staring at his contact for a long time, that stupid tiger emoticon and the little round photo of him and Godzilla, I erased the number too.
When I wasn’t at school, I holed up in my bedroom, mostly in the dark. For the first few days, all I did, from the minute I set down my backpack to the minute I went to sleep, was draw.
Getting into bed was easy. Getting out was a Herculean trial.
But another absence or tardy would definitely warrant a call home, and then my dad would have a reason to force me to talk to him, and I didn’t want to talk to anyone.
So I dragged myself out of bed. Somewhere around the fourth day, I put on jeans instead of sweats, a nice sweater instead of a ratty hoodie.
I styled my hair and finally used the cologne the DeLucas had given me on my birthday.
I caught up on schoolwork. I focused on the things I could control.
Every day, I went to school determined not to look toward Mason, to save myself the pain and the longing. But it was as inevitable as the end of the world. At the time, it felt as catastrophic too.
Mason looked ill. And somehow brittle, like he would snap with a touch.
He didn’t bother dressing well. His face seemed sunken, not like he’d lost weight but like something had been drained out of him.
Whatever it was had taken the light in his eyes with it.
When I saw him with his friends, Blake and the other guys from the team, he was the quiet one.
Mason Kane was not, in any lifetime, meant to be the quiet one.
It killed me to see it, but I had to check every day, every class we shared, every time we passed in the hallway. I had to see that he was okay. Or—not okay. But whatever he was feeling, it wasn’t worse than death.
It would pass. He would recover, move on, find someone who wasn’t perfect for him but was close. He was easy to love.
I felt eyes on me often. I heard the rumors.
I had cheated; I had feelings for Cella; his family was homophobic; my family was racist; the football team had shoved Mason back into the closet.
I didn’t care about their gossip or their stares, but one pair of eyes was hard to ignore.
I felt it all day, flitting across my profile. Cella wanted to talk to me.
So I put on my best mean mug. It had always been a defense mechanism; I had just never used it on her. But the idea of her tapping my shoulder in class to ask What happened or Are you okay filled me with more anger than I could hold. I didn’t know where to put it. It was all directed at me anyway.
I had betrayed her irrevocably, but when I’d needed her, she had stayed without hesitating, without even asking why. I didn’t deserve her.
Not her, not anyone. My dad tried more than once to reach me, and all I could think when I heard him calling was that he wouldn’t be at my door if he knew the whole story.
I had betrayed him too. Unforgivably, I had betrayed my mother.
How was I supposed to face him, to let him rub my back and offer fatherly advice, when I knew I would do it again, and again, and again, if I had the chance?
Annalisa’s knock came every night around sunset.
I wore my headphones when I knew it was coming.
For the moment, I almost hated her, or hated myself for not being her.
I was so bitter I couldn’t even look at her.
Annalisa’s relationship was perfect. She was going through so many changes, blossoming right in front of everyone’s eyes but mine.
It seemed dirty to seek her comfort, to suck up her energy like a parasite, when I couldn’t even be happy for her.
I was letting everybody down.